Taja Kramberger : biography

11 September 1970 -

Taja Kramberger (born 11 September 1970) is a Slovenian poet, translator, essayist and historical anthropologist.

She was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has finished undergraduate studies of history at the , where she studied also archaeology (absolved 4 years), but left it out when she became engaged in the literary field (1995) and postgraduate history studies. She obtained her PhD in 2009 from history/historical anthropology at the University of Primorska with a thesis entitled Memory and Remembrance. Historical Anthropology of the Canonized Reception.

She was an initiator and still is editor-in-chief of Monitor ISH-Review of Humanities and Social Sciences (2001–2003), in 2004 renamed to Monitor ZSA-Review for Historical, Social and Other Anthropologies(2004–2010). Between 2004 and 2007 she was a president of the TROPOS-Association for Historical, Social and Other Anthropologies and for Cultural Activities (Ljubljana, Slovenia).

She publishes monographs in the areas of epistemology of social sciences and historiography, history and historical anthropology of various subjects for the period between 18th to mid-20th Centuries. She is also a writer, she writes literary books, literary studies and essays. She translates texts from all fields mentioned from English, French, Italian and Spanish to Slovenian language. She lives in Koper, where she is employed as university teacher at the University of Primorska.

She earned some scientific and literary fellowships abroad at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris, Collegium Budapest in Budapest, Edition Thanhaeuser in Ottensheim, Austria. She also publishes scientific and literary articles, essays and translations. She participates at international scientific and literary conferences and also collaborates in the organizations of them, as for example in the case of international conferences Territorial and Imaginary Frontiers and Identities from Antiquity until Today, accent on Balkans (2002 in Ljubljana) or international scientific conference of the Francophonie (AUF) titled Histoire de l’oubli/History of Oblivion (2008 in Koper).

Fields of her work and research are: epistemology of historiography and social sciences, historical anthropology, contemporary history from Enlightenment to mid-20th century, transmission and politics of memory/oblivion, intellectual history and cultural transfers in Europe, anti-intellectualism, dimensions of the Dreyfus Affair in Slovenian social Space and in Trieste, mechanisms of social exclusion, anthropology of sex and gender, constitution of (national and transnational) literary fields in Europe in 19th and 20th Centuries, studies of province and provincialism as a specific socio-historical phenomenon.

History, historical anthropology

Conceptualization of the collective memory and its distinctions from remembrance and history

Taja Kramberger introduced studies of collective memory, based on Halbwachsian instrumentarium (for his workd see: ) and numerous later improvements, in its theoretic aspect and epistemic conceptualization into Slovenian public, mostly composed of linear descriptive social sciences and humanities, in 2000/2001 (a course of lectures Conceptualization of the collective memory on Maurice Halbwachs, Frances Amelia Yates and Pierre Nora at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Ljubljana) and 2001 (she wrote an extensive introduction to the Maurice Halbwachs' Slovenian translation of La mémoire collective). Not many scholars followed the utterly important distinction between memory (mémoire) and remembrance (souvenir)&mdash;still some are (Drago Braco Rotar, Marija Jurič Pahor, Samuel Friškič)&mdash;, and were able to grasp the crucial categorical differences between memory and history, but her works expose her incontestably broad knowledge, highly pertinent argumentation and subtle discursive skills, which are not easy to contest.